What I'm personally more interested in is if the software, especially interface is any good. That will set it apart from what's on the market. And if it will ship with anything better than a primitive drag-and-drop upload system so we don't have to kludge our way with Foobar plugins or Dapper (which is made by one guy) if you want to have playlists.
A well done integrated device like this has a different market than those who are satisfied with a netbook or smartphone and rubber-banding on a DAC. You can't expect to beat that financially when you have so much more engineering to do. There's a whole bunch of people who really want a true Hi-Fi iPod replacement, and that doesn't exist. Something that sounds great, has a long lasting battery (Try to play DSD files with USB Player Pro feeding an external DAC on a smartphone. Watch the battery disappear,) has a good interface, and can sync playlists with computers, Windows and Mac, without having to resort to spotty third party software to do something the manufacturer should have done to begin with. .
We have many DAP options where the hardware is fantastic- Hifiman, Fiio, iBasso, etc. However, the software, especially the interface design, is dreadful. (For example, seriously, Fiio, you put M3U playlists at the bottom of the folder menu of all things, requiring us to scroll with the non-accelerating wheel through dozens or hundreds of folders to get to the playlists, instead of the already existing playlist menu? And you haven't fixed this for years despite all the firmware revisions? And when you choose to view by Genre you just get an alphabetical list of what could be hundreds of songs. It's hopeless. Do you even care about making a good interface after you put so much effort into wonderful hardware engineering?
For that matter, I love your hardware, HiFiMan, and if you put 10% of the thought you employed engineering circuitry into having a usable interface and intuitive buttons I'd buy your stuff in a heartbeat. A battery that lasts more than four hours would be nice, too. Or, until the newest Astell&Kern series came out, you had to add songs to playlists one by one within the player if you didn't want to use iRivers absolutely useless Windows-only software. For a kilobuck device. Ridiculous.
If the production interface is anything like Onkyo's Android app, I already have high hopes. They know how to make a good UI, but resorting to syncing with Doubletwist with transcoding disabled, as is the easier way to do things with Android if you want to use their app, is a bit kludgy. If the Onkyo addresses that shortcoming, they could really make a killing with this device.
